lasagna_coder

From the video I gather that texturing is still a manual step? I'm a little confused how your editor showed the model without a texture, then you were able to do a perfect color fill on the different parts of the model. One of the most difficult parts of modeling is the texturing, (bump/normal map, albedo/lighting, color, etc) with lots of trade offs for how big your texture is, how much can be re-used, not to mention the actual mapping stage, which even the best "smart" auto-mapping tools do just OK.

I'm impressed by the model demo, but a lot of the time comes from determining the style (conceptual design), then implementing that style within the details (which is the baking, painting aspects of creating the model textures). You mention Robolox/Minecraft and the demo uses a kind of low poly metaverse social app, which your demo fits well, so I'm wondering who your target market is, I assume its games/apps with high volume, low detail models at the moment, is this correct?

Web Serial API would also mean one could create an Atari-style paddle controller to go with this game, kind of like this project: https://github.com/drohen/paddle-game

Ah I need to learn more about this.

I think mostly managed by institutions. Don't know of any surrounding niches, or managed by independent people / organisations. But also this is kind of similar to a more structured web portal.

This sounds like a fun experiment. I wonder if anyone has already done something like what you describe.

Would be nice for the output to be a kind of collage of abstracts. Maybe convert them to audio using one of these magic AI voice synthesis things and spatially position them in a virtual lecture hall - walk past a door, hear the abstract, walk inside to get the full paper. There could be hallways of doors that are grouped together by some kind of metric.

My question doesn't exclude machines, at least I didn't intend to exclude them.

I feel like this begins to blur the lines between discovery tool and resource to be discovered.

The idea of instructable /project blog is interesting as a discovery tool though. It makes me wonder if the act of creating one is also a discovery tool, similar to a lecture pad or research notebook. It's kind of like, active vs passive discovery, kind of like I wrote about in the other comment, where one might have to develop a certain "method" using various tools to create a reliable + repeatable process. Once I start searching for an answer or move towards a goal, by keeping a log of the steps, the "discovery" of something "novel" might be just where the knowledge gaps are - knowing what I don't know. But like asking questions of other people, this isn't automated, and requires skill/practice/time.

Changelog is a good analogy. It would be nice if crawling, building a graph, and extracting some information was more straight forward and didn't involve so many paid platforms, PDFs, varying reference standards, with also a fairly high dependency on a search engine to find referenced papers. It's still not quite so easy to just "click through" and "Ctrl + F".

True, I feel like automated systems also seem to still be pretty far behind in terms of providing useful results for certain forms of discovery, but is still pretty easy for people. Take this question and most of Ask HN, there's some pretty interesting/useful results within a few minutes. But providing a question like mine to google and most results will yield pages of "alternative search engines to google" websites, which is no where near correct, but does "sound" correct if you didn't understand the context of my question, such as, what the Internet is and what a search engine is (and isn't).

But then, I feel like it doesn't really scale super well, and doesn't always handle vagueness. For example, even of HN I doubt there will be very many quality/useful answers, simply because there's a certain kind of popularity required to get that here. Looking at something like Quora, there's too much room for non-answers and what amounts to spam. Then, there's the difficulty of being specific enough that people can answer but also do so in a timely manner (the speed of a search engine to provide simply a "close enough" result is part of its utility).

Like the bibliography suggestion, although I said practicality doesn't matter, its an example of how interesting stuff can be discovered (without asking anyone) but requires a huge amount of time (after the initial "look up") and cognitive effort (but that's a kind of curve that tapers off once one is familiar with a particular area of research).

Ah yeah that's a good one too. Funny, one could say that this is a good way of finding interesting information, while also finding methods of finding interesting information.

It's interesting how many discovery practices rely on asking another person. That has got me thinking about the process of inquiry / learning. Another facet I guess is using some combination of tools, but developing a "method", similar to an experiment, where I have a goal/hypothesis/measurement and test some input against its output, see how close it brought me to the goal, assign some kind of value, then iterate until I've developed a kind of manual/automatic algorithm that can be applied.

I also think the idea of 2D and 3D virtual spatial positioning of links/abstracts is an interesting idea, but I can't recall anywhere I've found that done in a way I was impressed by.

> A 25 year old on 150k p/a will have major difficulty getting into the property market

errrrr... Australia is a big place so this isn't as concrete as you've made it sound. There's quite a lot of affordable property, but sure, the handful of places (cities) where a 25 year old can manage to get 150k p/a pre-tax income might also be inaccessible for buying property for a few reasons, one of which are the situation involving investors. However, this kind of person I wouldn't really exclude from being able to live the 'good life' available to Australians, but I get that this is moreso an example of a benchmark esp. related to the demographic of this forum.

Seriously though, many young devs in Australia can live a pretty great life beyond "home ownership" haha. And the average Australia can find decently priced property, just maybe not exactly in the neighbourhood they like most. But I don't think that's the point of property ownership.

Safari on iOS is still missing some important features that severely limits its usage.

as was mine (I'm in CEST timezone, fwiw)

Thanks for the info! Heh, if Blender is your only go to alternative for ease of simulations and usability, then there's definitely a need for improvement.

What are the names of some of this software that are a good example of in-use but are clunky/have awful usability? I ask because it sounds like an interesting area, and I would like to see for myself what you're working with.

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Mechatronics, which is why I'm interested in mechanical engineering. I guess this mostly implies servomechanisms, kinematics, motors.

Forever is a stretch, but, being the web, you can always save the page and store it somewhere locally. It'll probably be archived by the wayback machine soon anyway.

Also I would trade you mech eng tutoring for JS tutoring, if you've got the time.

For the graphics: - https://webglfundamentals.org/ - https://threejs.org/

For general JS: - https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/javascript#tuto...

There's other stuff like build tools, cross-browser, and other stuff, but that's likely to be confusing and not super necessary to begin with. The above should be enough to get you running with what it sounds like you want to do.

I appreciate you sharing those links. I'm trying to learn mechanical engineering stuff myself, if you have any further useful learning materials I would love to see them.

Tech stacks can be overwhelming, and in saying that this is what I do in 2021 and find it enjoyable: Snowpack + Typescript + ES6. I use regular CSS, just a single file.

If I do something unusual with importing files or some other kind of build process thing, chances are its only a few lines to write a plugin or perhaps a few shell commands from a npm script command (or a simple script written in node) to achieve the end goal.

I also use redom instead of a large framework. But also, the cool thing about TS and other front end stuff is that it's kind of fun to just find your own way. Of course, people like common practices, frameworks, etc. But also, exploring alternatives can reveal a lot about unseen potential.

I hope you find something you enjoy doing, life isn't worth wasting it on stuff you don't want to do.

edit: changed proverbial you to I, as I'm only referring to myself.

thanks, this is some good insight!

Would be a nice secondary business idea for some to create an ad company to cater to smaller online platforms like yours without requiring user data. Another complicated prospect but at least it would give you a starting point.

There's also things like https://coil.com/ who seem like they help support online content creators. I wonder if there's a way to treat search results like "content".

also, dark mode pls

I like this. But without adblock I see no ads. Also would it be possible to have a subscription based no-ad version so we don't see ads + don't feel guilty that we aren't helping out by not clicking any ads? I guess it would be hard to stay private because it would mix an paid account id with search queries, but maybe there's a way.

Hi! I like what you're doing here. I'm the author of a tool that utilises an opus encoder and decoder in the browser to emulate something like modern live streaming. I followed similar ideas to yours but ultimately found that the icecast route was a little bit limited. If you're interested, the code is here: https://github.com/gaxge and is in the process of being refactored/ updated. You can play around with the original prototype here: https://low.show/noisecrypt/app. I use the streaming tools mainly for doing stuff with jamming in combination with randomness but they can be repurposed for normal linear real-time streaming.

I'm also based in Germany, and you're welcome to reach out if you want to talk about this kind of stuff further.

The audio track is my jam.

It would be cool if there was a way to sandbox part of a website so that it could be sandboxed against specific functionality.

There's a donation button at the top of the page. Also, perhaps it's going to gauge volume and costs before developing a premium model. Looks like an early adopter model. Also, providing a service like this with the trade off being able to use and learn from the data for improving the product isn't uncommon (google forms, google mail...).

One thought I had that could avoid the harvesting data aspect would be to encrypt the data with a public key and then allowing the host to decrypt it locally with a private key. I think that's how products like Lastpass work.